Enabling a proactive Product Recall Solution with RFID

If you’ve been watching any of the TV news channels over the last few days you could not have missed the amount of public outcry / outrage at the peanut contamination issues or the largest recall ever executed (Govt issues record 2.1M recall for dropside cribs) that have been affecting our daily lives / lifestyle….

In our last post, we sought to seek answers around how a new breed of product recall solutions could be enabled to prevent contaminated goods from reaching us (the end consumers) in the first place and prevent such unsavory incidents from happening again.

An approach to tackling (and solving) this issue we believe is to utilize the real time visibility that RFID tags can provide in the supply chain to search, locate, and remove tainted goods. Simply put, RFID tags on items (on items or containers of homogeneous items at the time of manufacturing) will provide us the automatic visibility required to ‘track and trace’ goods as they flow through the supply chain, resulting in a observational system that allows for a proactive recall solution to be implemented.

Over the next few paragraphs, I will provide, in ‘tech-speak’, an under the cover look into the moving pieces that need to come together for such a solution to be implemented and adopted across the supply chain. If you are more interested in understanding what you need to do as a manufacturer to put this ‘early warning system’ in place or if you a consumer who is wondering what needs to be done to prevent these tainted goods from reaching you in the first place, feel free to skip and go straight to the first clip of a live demo that I recorded (working prototype built on top of our existing RTVS based warehouse visibility solution) to showcase the solution at work.

The S3Edge 3 tier “On-Device, On-Premise, On-Demand” architecture is a service oriented approach to deploying and executing Software + Services on device, edge, and cloud to harness operational visibility in real time in your business processes.

The moving pieces in this approach are typically characterized by:

1. Execution of Physical World Workflow’s On-Device to go from tag or sensor observations to actions

2. A central workflow controller On-Premise that is responsible for the design and deployment of the physical world workflows in addition to facilitating remote management of RFID and sensor devices

3. Services On-Demand (i.e. in the cloud) for federated real-time visibility via the cloud. These could be a combination of .NET Services for distributed notifications across firewalls, SQL Data Services for rich data aggregation, and the Windows Azure platform to host applications in the cloud

The “On-Device, On-Premise, On-Demand” architecture thus scales from a basic solution of providing a closed loop On-Premise + On-Device solution for an organization looking to incorporate real time visibility into their business processes within 4 walls to utilizing Software + Services for federated visibility across the extended enterprise, and revolutionizing the notion of real-time visibility on tap.

At the recently concluded Gartner AADI conference we showcased how a Internet scale ‘search and locate’ application to initiate and execute product recall across the extended enterprise could be designed and executed with Software On-Premise and On-Device, and Services On-Demand (.NET Services + SQL Data Services in the cloud). Key features of the RTVS based Product Recall solution that I demonstrated included:

Enabling of supply chain managers to ask: “Where are my products right now?” and get a response back in real-time from distributed locations across the supply chain

Publishing of global product recall alerts across the extended enterprise, and enable all affected parties (ex: warehouse managers or retailers) to get an instantaneous snapshot of “Products within my 4 walls that are dangerous”

Abilities for all affected parties to schedule and execute a recall in-house, and be able to provide status to initiator in a secure manner

The clips below shows how such a system would work from soup to nuts.

Enjoy and as always keep the conversation going and the questions coming!